startled

Trying to have less stuff

I’m not talking about some anti-consumerist, anti-technology, back to the land, self-sufficient hippy commune/rutabaga plantation somewhere in Montana type scheme. I still intend to have brand new shoes I don’t particularly need delivered to my doorstep from the internet whenever I feel like it. I’m referring instead to the parts of the house that are unnavigable without tripping over stacks of Cingular Wireless bills from the mid-oughts or Matrox-era video cards or discarded Ikea fastening hardware.

Most of those things are precious, mind you, but there are other things I’m starting to get rid of.

That monitor served me through most of college, a Cornerstone p1600. Crisp and clear, the highest resolution I’d ever seen, and a refresh rate that’s still faster than LCD monitors 10 years later. It also weighs as much as a 21″ monitor, and VGA connectors are so unfashionable now. It has depreciated slightly in value, from maybe $850 to zero.

That there is my first Ethernet hub (it’s not even a switch!) It connected my computers to the world’s largest collection of cat jokes and pornography. Pleasantly, my home internet connection is now faster than my local, 10BASE-T network was then. Remember wondering what the BASE stood for? Or the T, for that matter?

This stuff was pretty awesome, but not quite as awesome as floorspace. I’m pretty sure this won’t be my last late-night visit to Earthcare Recycling’s 24-hour drop-off box, but hopefully this will get the wistful blog posts about it out of my system.

A ringing endorsement

My mom just tweeted instructions for turning off Google Buzz.

It’s too laaaate to ‘pologize (Jefferson edition)

Short reviews of airplane movies

I’m not usually worried about my personal safety aboard commercial airplanes, but I was briefly afraid that Four Christmases could be the last movie I’d ever see. I was very relieved once they started showing the next movie without crashing into the Pacific ocean.

On a 747 bound for Sydney, they actually had enough time to show four movies, twice each. On the way home, I rode in a much more luxurious 777 with in-seat entertainment, so I could at least pick and choose how I wanted to while away the hours. Here are some micro-reviews of the movies I can still remember watching on those flights:

Aboard United flight 863, non-stop service from San Francisco to Sydney:

Four Christmases - Already reviewed, but that was some amazingly lazy story crafting. Apparently directed by the fellow who did King of Kong, which you should actually see. Our otherwise excellent flight attendant thought it was hilarious.

500 Days of Summer - I saw most of this twice, but missed the beginning both times. I expected to hate it for being a romantic comedy, but it turns out that it’s not really. The non-linear storytelling kind of won me over. Cute and well crafted, but I’d probably never admit that in public.

The Time Traveler’s Wife - A naked guy copes with being naked in Chicago in winter. With few exceptions, I hate stories about time travel, but I’ll give it this: at least no one was able to affect the future. Raises interesting logistical questions about Clare the time traveler; lots of the movie is about Eric Bana breaking into stores or beating up people for clothes, does 8-year-old Clare manage the same?

Up - Oh, I guess they showed some movie about talking dogs, but I’d already seen it. I guess it’s nominated for Best Animated Pixar Film of 2009?

Aboard Air New Zealand flights 104 and 8, service from Sydney to San Francisco through Auckland.

Valkyrie - The good Germans have British accents, the evil Germans have German accents. The good Germans are trying to assassinate Hitler. I wonder if they’re going to succeed? (No.)

The Informant! - Poor, poor Mark Whitacre. Like watching a train wreck (being artfully filmed by Steven Soderbergh). The non sequitur voice overs are great. Most bizarre is that the real Mark Whitacre is currently the chief operating officer of a biotech company. Fun, but Soderbergh has done more fun.

Zombieland - Heartwarming! Unclear why the remaining four non-zombied humans are quite that distrustful of one another, but why worry about that when there’s a plot that needs advancin’.

Surrogates - Premise: human beings are isolated from physical effects by surrogate robots. By circumventing all negative physical consequences of their actions, crime is somehow eliminated. Everything leads up to the not-very-climactic scene, where all of the robots are disabled over the internet. Why do these Luddites keep destroying my textile factory?

Inglourious Basterds - There is more tension in a scene about a glass of milk than there was in all of Valkyrie. The not-exactly-good Americans are trying to assassinate Hitler. I wonder if they’re going to succeed? (Oh, Quentin.)

Sunshine Cleaning - A down on her luck single mother wants a better life for her down on his luck son. She gets an idea from her boyfriend, a down on his luck married cop, to start a crime scene cleaning business. She enlists the help of her down on her luck sister, and they go to work cleaning up after suicide victims (which reminds them just a bit of their mother, who committed suicide when they were kids). Meanwhile, the sisters’ down on his luck father fails repeatedly at small time business schemes. In the end, everyone comes together for a milkshake and pizza. Also, the sister isn’t very good at being a lesbian.

I guess it’d be worth discussing the actual trip to Australia, and not just the in-flight entertainment. I’ll have pictures up soon! Really!

Everything is Everything

Everything is Everything, by Koki Tanaka. Fair warning: you will either find this hypnotic or really boring.

Maybe 2010 really is the future!

The red line roughly graphs the speed of the computers I’ve used over the last twenty years. It shows nice, exponential growth up until a few years ago, when chip designers had to start trading clock speed for increasing numbers of cores. The blue line shows how miserably stagnant my home internet bandwidth was until this Thursday.

Before this week, I hadn’t seen a connection speed increase for a decade. I’ve been stuck with 1.5 Mb/s down, 384 Kb/s up since DSL first became available to me. When I moved from Santa Barbara, a communications backwater, to the heart of Silicon Valley, I was somehow still stuck with the same plan. I was always a little too far from the data center to get a 3 or 6Mb/s plan.

On Tuesday evening, I finally broke down and ordered Comcast Business Cable. On Thursday morning, the tech came over and replaced every piece of coaxial cable between the utility pole and my shiny new modem. The internet is more than ten times faster now, and it feels glorious. Like, ridiculously so. I feel like a caveman returning to his family after a successful hunt. “We will not hunger tonight, my friends. Tonight we dine on real-time streaming 720p cat videos!”

I probably felt this way when I first got DSL, too, so twelve megabits may have to last me a while. I better go download everything I’m going to want right away while it still feels fast.

Snakes on a tablet

Remember Snakes on a Plane? I guess it was a movie a few years back, but I never bothered to see it. The version on the internet was much better. It all started with a blog post by Josh Friedman. You should read it if you haven’t, but he explained that the movie was being developed, that it had this amazing title, and that it starred Samuel L. Jackson. Those few details were enough to throw open hitherto unknown floodgates deep in the internet.

People made shirts, movie trailers, posters, scripts, fan fiction, blogs, forums, and all of it months before even a movie trailer was available. The internet fervor became so immense that the filmmakers knew their movie couldn’t live up to the hype. So they hired everyone back for re-shoots and made the film a little campier, a little gorier, a little raunchier, and filled it with all the fans’ favorite lines (the ones they had written themselves).

Don’t know what made me think of that today. Oh, right.

Everybody joked that a tablet computer from Apple would just be a giant iPhone, and that that would be a stupid thing to make. But since Apple is smart, they wouldn’t make a tablet computer unless it was much more interesting than that. The tablet’s development has been rumored for years, and Apple trounced people’s expectations when they made a phone and a music player, so what exactly did they have up their sleeves? The internet got to work designing it for themselves, fueled by their desires and occasional leaks and rumors.

A book reader to kill the Kindle. A beautiful OLED screen for crisp text. World-class handwriting recognition so you could take notes in class. An SD card reader so you could back up photos in the field. Might as well add a projector so you can display photos and movies on the wall. Names were mulled over for the branding campaign: iTablet, iSlate, MacBook Touch, Canvas.

So the trailer is finally out, and it turns out it was a big iPhone all along. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing: I like my iPhone, but my pockets aren’t big enough for its larger cousin. The hardware looks interesting enough, with some tradeoffs that should make the Kindle team breath a sigh of relief. In the end, it’s undeniable that the version on the internet was superior. I hope it fares better after some re-shoots.

Inevitability

Every tech journalist has already written whatever story they’re going to write about Apple’s new Canvas (or whatever they’ll call the tablet). Now they’re just waiting for the announcement so they can fill in the details; X inches, Y gigahertz, Z dollars. Whether an article is about a “sleek, revolutionary, life-changing device” or a “too-large, too-niche, over-hyped disappointment” will not change before the press deadline.

I guess ukeleles are cool now?

I was pretty sure that ukeleles weren’t cool. That’s what I remember, anyway. Playing a tiny guitar was about as cool as taking “computer media” in high school and learning about non-linear video editing on a questionably legal copy of Adobe Premiere.

Fast forward a decade or so, and the kids are getting internet-famous combining ukelele talents with their video editing skills.

Molly Lewis is far from alone in the YouTube ukelele ensemble. Julia Nunes has posted dozens of covers and original songs, which has led to tours and CDs. Jonathan Coulton has invited Kristen Shirts and her ukelele to play in several shows. This kid appears to be 5, and already has one Zimbabwe worth of views for his ukelele playing (but needs to work a bit on the lyrics).

I guess I think it’s neat when nerdy exploits become kind of cool. Like maybe it’s okay to knit in public now? It gives me some hope for Major League Gaming. Heck, maybe even hacker spaces will become cool if we wait long enough.

Sugimoto Kousuke’s “The TV Show”

via youtube.com